Deathmatch

As mentioned several times on here, sport was an important part of school life and it took a lot to get games lessons cancelled. During the winter you could expect to be forced to play football or rugby on pitches that were either as hard as concrete or so wet that entire teams went missing, sucked down into the depths only to emerge years later like bog bodies clad in ‘House’ colours. Summer was however, different.

Summer sports involved cricket and athletics and our cricket field was also used by the county side as a training ground so the groundsman was less than happy to have sixty lads tearing up his beautiful turf should the weather be a bit on the damp side. Thus on those days when it was chucking it down we would find ourselves confined to the school gyms and the game of potential violent death that was indoor cricket.

Indoor cricket was simple…and deadly. You had two chairs acting as wickets, a full size cricket bat and a tennis ball. In order to score runs you had to hit the ball somewhere in the hall. So far, so simple…but what about the deadly part? Somewhere over the years the rules had been amended a little. Rumour had it this had occurred in 1975 and coincided with the release of the film ‘Rollerball’. Not only did you score points by running back and forth between the wickets but points were also awarded for how many of the opposing team were put out of action. This could be achieved by scything their legs from under them in a sliding attempt to reach the wicket before the ball or by giving the ball a hard enough thwack to turn it into a deadly missile that ricocheted off walls and into the backs of the fielding teams heads. A massive ten points was awarded for hitting the right hand top panel of the gymnasium doors which meant that the ball had to be hit with some force at roughly head height causing bowlers and fielders to hit the floor rather than risk decapitation by a manky old tennis ball.

It was always possible to tell which year had been on ‘wet games’ as at 3.30pm they would stagger from the gym holding handkerchiefs to bleeding noses or wads of wet paper towels to already swollen eyes. A few would even emerge disconsolately holding a dislodged tooth in the hope that their parents knew a really good dentist.

Thus it was that one particularly soggy summer day in 1980 we found ourselves in the school gym and forced to take part in the orgy of violence and bloodshed that was indoor cricket. The games teacher had left us to it and had returned to the comfort of the P.E masters room no doubt to catch up with the papers and have a crafty slug of the Scotch we knew was kept in the filing cabinet.

We had been playing for about an hour. The bodies were already piling up on the mats at the back of the gym. There were at least two minor concussions, a split lip, a black eye and Toby was curled into a ball clutching his groin. However, we had just bowled the other team out to three falls and a submission and we were in to bat. Being half decent players and not having suffered any debilitating wounds during our fielding my kindly team mates volunteered Andy and I to go in to bat first.

Andy got the first ball. BLAT! Beautiful two wall ricochet that ended up in the middle of Micks back winding him for the few vital seconds to allow a run to be scored. Next ball. THWAP! Near miss that caused Trev’ to duck but was insanely fielded by Clive. Andy was out, next man in was Toby, still walking a bit funny from his earlier encounter with the ball. WHUMP! Deflection from the bars that left Clive with a bleeding nose and in the scramble to reach the wicket Toby took down Simon the opposition bowler with what looked like a sliding tackle culminating with a poke to the stomach with the bat.

…and so it continued. I had managed to reach 35 runs, we had whittled the other team down to seven fielders but Pete and I were the last remaining batsmen in and we were 12 points down. Pete was not a great player so it looked to be down to me. Gavin was bowling and launched a vicious bouncer in my direction. THUMP! By some miracle bat and ball connected and the ball zinged to the corner of the gym and we scored two runs. Ten points down. The next ball, an equally fast and vicious bouncer was hit and bounced off a couple of walls. Another two points were made and by this time the rest of the team were yelling encouragement. In fact they were yelling quite loudly. Loudly enough to rouse the games master from his paper in the P.E masters room.

Back in the hall I was ready for Gavins next bouncer, he launched the ball and I saw a chance. THWACK! Straight as a die the ball rocketed towards the gym doors. Ten points! Oh yes! Errr! No! With impeccable timing, the games master opened the door and my ten point ball smacked into his chin with an audible CRUNCH! He stood for a couple of seconds and then went down as if pole-axed and my cricket whites nearly went brown. Luckily Gavin who was a scout and had done his first aid badge ascertained that the games master was still alive and breathing.

It was just as Gavin had announced his diagnosis that the headmaster arrived, having also been disturbed by the noise from the gym, to discover a crowd of boys, one of whom was holding a cricket bat standing over an unconscious teacher. If that wasn’t bad enough another group of boys was huddled on the gym mats trying to staunch bleeding noses, lips and other extremities with their cricket whites. ‘Lord of the Flies’ had nothing on that scene and it was almost possible to read his thoughts from the haunted look on his face. Should he go on or should he swiftly retreat, lock the doors and call the police, the army and possibly the local asylum as well?

Fortunately sanity prevailed and everything was soon sorted out. The school matron was called and arrived swiftly only smelling ever so slightly of medicinal brandy and between the headmaster and the hastily summoned head of maths the games master was carted off to the school medical room. Strangely we never got to play indoor cricket ever again. Wet games days were spent improving ourselves in the school library where the likelihood of sudden and violent death was a lot less… unless of course the librarian went a bit mental with the date stamp.

A sense of chemistry

It may have been years of sniffing fumes that the not quite as efficient as they could be fume cupboards at our school had allowed to escape. It could just have been a natural propensity towards insanity but most of our chemistry masters showed a shocking tendency to lean in the direction of the more mentalist end of the spectrum.

Mr Roberts was incredibly trusting to the point of naivety and would leave entire classes to their own devices for periods at a time, returning only at the sound of fire alarms or clouds of poisonous gases rolling down the corridor. Mr Peters bordered on the psychotic and his accuracy with a board rubber was legendary as many of us discovered with a chalky smack to the back of the head and Mr Burton was well, in a league of his own. Mr Burton was definitely not all there but Mr Burton liked practical demonstrations. He liked them a lot and did not take much note of health and safety, not that there was much of that back in 1983 and providing he did not burn the school down or lose too many pupils his little ‘accidents’ were on the whole overlooked.

His favourite demonstration was of distillation. He would mix up some copper sulphate, a pleasantly poisonous substance, in water, attach it to a set of distillation apparatus, distil the water off and drink it to show that pure water was produced from the toxic solution. He would do this every year without fail as the fourth lesson for the first years in the lab next door to the sixth form library.

Now, as it happened a number of us sixth formers were in the sixth form library that fateful afternoon. We were supposed to be studying. In fact most us were lounging around in a state of fitful torpor following a lunchtime not at all underage drinking session at the local pub whose landlord had appalling eyesight and who apparently could not tell a sixteen year old from a sixty year old. The lab and the library had a connecting door and it was Pete, spying through the keyhole that realised that Mr Burton was going to carry out his famous demonstration. It was also Pete who suggested pulling a practical joke and it was Pete who had the means to do so in his pocket.

Pete was our resident delinquent and punk rocker. He spent most of his out of school hours hanging around the local park with the older punks drinking whatever concoctions they had managed to steal from the local supermarket or in the case of Pete, his dads cocktail bar. Nowadays hanging around in parks drinking cider is the preserve of the local chavs, back then it was the preserve of middle class schoolboys with safety pins in their blazer as a sign of rebellion. As a result of this Pete habitually carried a half bottle of vodka around with him in his rucksack, something that would lead to him being carried out of the boys toilets one lunchtime during the A-Level exams, half conscious and mumbling something about how he fancied Mrs O’Hara, the head of biology and a lady who made Mrs Thatcher look sweet and cuddly.

Anyhow, a plan was swiftly hatched and put into action. Andy was sent to knock on the door of the lab and when Mr Burton answered, informed him that the headmaster wished to see him rather urgently. As Mr Burton left Pete was through the connecting door like a shot and began phase two of the plan. The distilled water in a lab beaker at the end of the apparatus was quickly poured down the sink and replaced with a generous helping of vodka whilst the rest of us threatened the class of new first years with the direst of punishments if they breathed a word when Mr Burton returned. The whole operation took less than two minutes and we were all back in the library before Mr Burton wandered back looking slightly more confused than he normally did.

Unaware that he had an extra audience peering through the keyhole and any chinks in the painted glass of the door he launched into his spiel, something about the “Distillate being pure water and perfectly safe to drink as the toxic impurities had been left at the other end of the apparatus”. With this he raised the beaker and took a huge swig…coughed…gagged…gasped…swore…gasped a bit more and staggered towards the door. We all looked at each other as the sounds of him lurching across the corridor were followed by the sounds of someone being violently ill in the staff toilets.

A couple of days later in the morning assembly the headmaster reported that Mr Burton was expected to make a full recovery after a lab experiment had gone tragically wrong although he may not return for a while due to the accident exacerbating a few other problems in Mr Burtons private life.

It wasn’t until weeks later we discovered that he was a recovering alcoholic taking some seriously unpleasant drugs that would make him throw up if he so much as looked at a bottle of booze or walked within fifty yards of a pub. We just thought that the far away look was part and parcel of being a chemistry teacher inhaling all those noxious fumes, not that he was a bit partial to a bottle or two of Scotch of an evening to help him forget his days teaching horrible little bastards like us. Perhaps fortunately for us he eventually made a complete recovery but according to younger siblings who attended the school after we left he never performed the copper sulphate trick ever again without taking a good long sniff of what had emerged from the apparatus even if he had been standing watching the process from beginning to end.

Flour Power

‘Home Economics’, two words that struck dread into the hearts of most of the first year boys at my school. Apart from one or two who preferred needlework and making light fluffy sponges and well, they were considered a bit on the strange side anyhow. The rest of us would have much rather been in metal work making the kind of sharp, pointy implement that would give Rambo wet dreams.

It wasn’t that we hated the lesson as such, at the end of it you got to sample the things everyone else had made and on the whole the recorded fatalities from Salmonella and Botulism were in the low double digits. No, it was simply that the double period on a Tuesday morning was stiflingly boring, made even more so by Mrs Cash, our Home Economics tutor being the most safety conscious person in the whole world and not letting us anywhere near anything vaguely sharp as well as insisting we wore the kind of outfits more at home in the chemistry labs where at least there were substances that could bring about horrible and agonising death. In Home Economics the worst that could happen would be a fellow pupil running amok with a potato masher.

Suffice it to say we tried desperately to banish the boredom but all our attempts seemed doomed to failure. The tabletop finger soccer match using dried peas came to an abrupt halt when an over enthusiastic corner kick ricocheted off the blackboard and into the batter mix Mrs Cash was showing us how to make resulting in a ban on dried peas. The Spaghetti catapult incident led to just about everything being banned apart from flour and what harm could flour do?

As it happens, quite a lot in the wrong hands! In the hands of a baker it can be made into succulent, crisp crusted loaves or indulgent cakes. In the hands of a bunch of schoolboys it becomes a near lethal weapon.

It was a dreary November day and we were supposed to be making rock cakes when Mrs Cash was called away to attend an incident in the gym in her other role as stand in school nurse when the real one was incapacitated due to her medicinal brandy habit or on ‘holiday’ due to the same. Now was the time for mischief but what could we do? We had no sharp implements so murder and torture were out of the question. All we had was flour, water, margarine and currants and barring covering the class swot in ‘Stork’ there wasn’t much else we could do. It was Gavin who suggested the ‘pillar of flame’, as he had seen it done by some lads in the council flats where his aunt lived. All we needed was a stairwell, a bag of flour and matches and we had all three. As a precaution, just in case someone got a bit too enthusiastic with the flambé the classroom had a fire exit that led to a concrete stairwell, we had bags of flour and given the smoking habits of half the boys in the school there was no shortage of matches and lighters either.

The method of making the ‘pillar of flame’ was easy, someone, in our case Gavin, stood at the top of the stairs and shook flour down through the stairwell, someone at the bottom, Andy, threw a match into the descending flour and the result was a pleasing pillar of flame. All very spectacular the first two times we did it but we had failed to notice that not all the flour burnt and the air was getting thick with dust. On the third attempt Gavin, perhaps trying to impress may have shaken a bit too much as when the match was hurled the result was not so much ‘pillar of flame’, more ‘wrath of God’. In fact it may be that the whole ten commandments and burning bush thing was less a religious experience than a couple of Israelites arsing about with wheat based products when Moses arrived on Mount Sinai.

Fortunately most of us were shielded by the stairs and only received a superficial scorching but Gavin who had been leaning over the edge of the top banister took the full force of the flaming column that ignited with an audible ‘WHOMPH’ that rattled the door at the base of the stairs. This was followed by noises that could only be described as a strangled “Argh!” and a slightly louder “SHIIIITE!” We raced to the top of the stairs to find Gavin standing in a state of total shock, his face red, missing his eyebrows and with wisps of smoke rising from his hair. Below us Andy was frantically stamping on his white coat that had gone a distinctly sooty colour. Quickly we bundled Gavin back into the classroom and stuck his head under the tap at one of the sinks…just as Mrs Cash arrived back from whatever emergency had occurred in the gym to find us apparently trying to drown one of our number whilst another stood gazing forlornly at a coat that appeared to have been put in the oven at gas mark four.

As she stood staring in disbelief at the now soaking and eyebrow-less Gavin it was possible to see her struggling with how to phrase “What the fucking hell is going on here you little bastards?” in terms that could be delivered to a bunch of 11 and 12 year old children. It was left to Martin, always one to come up with a good answer to say

“It was the oven Miss, the gas must have been on and when he tried to light it there was an explosion. You really ought to get the caretaker to check it out, we might have been killed.”

That it was only the boys that had apparently come to close to death was probably what led to her being less convinced of this than she was that we had been mucking around with the ovens. As a result we got to spend the rest of the lesson copying out recipe books whilst frantically praying that she would have no need to go to the fire exit stairwell which was covered in flour and scorch marks and that we could blame the devastation on the 3rd form who had the lesson after ours.

Porterhouse II

I’m sure that the liberal minded do-gooder who decided that it would be wise to educate us in the mysteries of human sexuality regretted it afterwards. If they did not they really should have given the mayhem their afternoon lecture caused the following day.

It wasn’t so much that the lecture, delivered to half of the sixth form, namely thirty or so seventeen year old boys, most of who were already engaging or at least trying to, in carnal ramblings with the other half of the sixth form that consisted of thirty or so seventeen year old girls that caused the mayhem. It was the packets of condoms that were handed out to us to promote safe sex and responsibility. No doubt the person who donated them presumed they would mummify in our wallets as most condoms handed out to teenage boys had tended to do in previous more sexually unenlightened times. How wrong they were!

So, there we were, thirty or so seventeen year olds, most of whom already had wallets stuffed to bursting with prophylactics stolen from older siblings bedside cabinets, from the local barbers having endured the gazes and knowing nods of the older gents when Mr Ginelli asked “Something for the weekend sir?” and in the case of Pete whose parents ran the local chemist, from the stockroom out at the back and all of a sudden we each had an extra packet of three. If we tried to cram any more in our wallets there was a serious risk of condom overload and resulting eruption that would cover the school playground from end to end with things that were ribbed, bobbled, nubbled and tentacled for his and her pleasure. So what could we do with them?

The answer was simple, why not inflate them and fill the sixth form year masters broom cupboard-like office with them. Brilliant idea! Mr Dart the previous incumbent had just retired and his successor was to be named the next day. An office filled with inflated condoms would be a jolly jape to welcome him or her into the post. Er…maybe not. Unfortunately, being seventeen our reading matter tended to consist of 2000AD and lurid books about SS Panzer battalions from the cheap bookshop in town. It did not stretch to ‘Porterhouse Blue’ and its potential warning about inflated condoms. What’s more we should never have trusted Pete with the inflation of said condoms as he had never read the book either.

The following morning we all arrived bright and early which in itself was unusual given that most of us rolled in sometime after morning assembly just in time for mid morning break and a game of poker before the first lesson of the day. Pete had obviously been in since the crack of dawn as the year masters office was filled with inflated johnnies that resembled oversized maggots. The 90 or so that we had all contributed had been supplemented by a fair few more stolen from Petes parents chemists shop and the room was stuffed as full as it possibly could be. Now all we had to do was attend assembly and discover who the lucky recipient of our splendid wheeze was.

Standing at the back we endured the usual badly sung hymns, the congratulations to the first 11 who had managed to escape with a 25-0 mauling against another local school and how the study garden was not to be used to play cricket in. Finally the revelation of who the new sixth form master was came…Mr Bowles, probably the single most humourless individual in the school. Over the years his reputation had grown worse with each passing term. Here was a man who would give a pupil a weeks detention for just standing in the wrong way. We had arranged for his office to be filled with contraceptives. In the back row the entire sixth form went a very pale shade of their usual colour and one thought passed silently through all our minds…”Oooooh fuck!” We were doomed to a lifetime of detention, in fact we would probably be old and grey before we would be let out.

Perhaps fortunately for us, at the back of the hall was a cupboard that connected with the PE department changing rooms. Hurriedly, three of us, Nigel, Andy and myself shielded by the rest of the sixth form crawled through this and fled the building, running across to the sixth form common rooms as fast as we could. We had only a short time to get rid of the contraceptives before Mr Bowles turned up as was tradition after the assembly in which he had been named but how could we do it. There were so many in the tiny room we could only just get the door open a crack. There was only one way, burst them with something. But what could we use? Darts! There was a dartboard in the common room, we all used it, we could poke the condoms with darts. There was only one problem with the plan, there were not any darts in the board, most of the players brought their own and kept them in their rucksacks. What about something sharp from the woodwork block next door suggested Nigel so he and I scurried off leaving Andy behind.

We had only just reached the door of the woodwork block when behind us we heard what sounded like a series of muffled car backfires, a slightly louder bang and the sound of breaking glass. Running back we crashed back into the common room to find Andy standing by the office door looking somewhat traumatised with a cigarette lighter in hand. Beyond him the sixth form masters office resembled an explosion in a contraceptive factory, which, as we found out later was not far off the mark. We had just enough time to bundle him out of the fire door and run round the building as the rest of the sixth form arrived with Mr Bowles. We had joined the tail end and were witnesses to the look of utter astonishment on his face as he surveyed what was supposed to have been his office but which was now an area of devastation, missing a window pane and littered with singed paper and bits of pink latex. Suffice it to say he was not a happy chap.

It was only later we pieced together the whole sorry tale. Pete had indeed arrived early that morning and faced with inflating almost a hundred condoms had cheated a bit and using the gas hose from the oven in the common room kitchen, had filled them with good old North Sea gas. Andy had not really expected them to be inflated with anything but air when, desperate to get rid of the Zeppelin like prophylactics, he had applied his lighter after managing to open the door a crack. At first there had been a brief chain reaction but this, as chain reactions have a tendency to do had turned into something bigger. The resulting gas explosion had blown out one of the window panes and shot a sheet of flame past Andy who had been lucky to have been shielded by the door.

The entire sixth form had their privileges revoked for two months, no darts, no cards and were expected to spend their free breaks and lunchtimes studying in the library. We were sternly reminded that condoms were meant for other purposes than blowing up the school, something that may also have been regretted when the head boy was discovered in bed with Miss Wilder, the new gym mistress at an end of term party that year.

The Great Rubber Band War

It probably started like so many conflicts with a relatively minor incident, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand style assassination attempt round the back of the boys toilets perhaps but soon the ‘Great Rubber Band War’ of 1978 had taken a momentum of its own. The minor incident became forgotten as the cries to arms went out. Hit and run border raids on the second year corner of the playground were unleashed and retaliated against and by the end of the week full scale open warfare had broken out. Just about every able-bodied boy in the 1st and 2nd years began packing heat in the form of rubber bands purloined from the bursars stationery cupboard and a pocket full of folded paper pellets.

From the stalemate of trench warfare hiding behind the walled flowerbeds of the ‘study garden’ to grand sweeping charges across the playing field nowhere in the school was safe and every break reverberated to the ping of rubber bands and the yelps of the victims as a lucky shot caught them in the back of the neck. Naturally the masters attempted to ‘discourage’ us by confiscating rubber bands and having us turn out our pockets, rucksacks, briefcases and bags but it was not like we were turning up to school with an Uzi and a couple of Glocks like most pupils of today seem to do so on the whole they were fairly laid back about it. After all, nobody was going to get killed, that task was covered by the PE department and their ten mile runs. At least they were laid back about it until the ‘East bank massacre’.

The ‘war’ had been humming along nicely for best part of a month. The massed battles had given way to a more static and ambush based conflict. Us 1st years defended our corner of the playground and had made significant gains around the library, Physics building and lower school toilet block. Along with our allies in the 3rd year we also held a chunk of the upper school playground. After a long stalemate and threats of a sound thrashing if we disturbed its solitude ever again, the ‘study garden’ had become neutral territory guarded by the fearsome Mrs Trotter of the music department. The 2nd years held the area around the biology labs, the school gym and the newly built ‘Home Economics’ suite as well as good portion of the area of land that bordered the playing fields. As in other wars our ‘generals’, three of the quieter kids who were members of the school war game club, decided that a major offensive must be launched.

Maybe events would have been different if Mike had not decided to up the ante a little with his homemade multi-banded miniature crossbow that could be used to launch inky pellets with the potential to mark our foe as victims of war. Maybe they would have been drastically different if he had not shared his design with the rest of us and we, instead of being the blood-thirsty warriors of the playground out for honour in battle had not copied it in our dads sheds and garages over the weekend and turned up at school the following Monday with an assortment of inky paper projectile launching devices that would make Dennis the Menace go white with fear. Maybe too, things would have not culminated in the ‘East bank massacre’ if our generals had, like generals before and after not been relying on faulty intelligence.

Word had gone out that the 2nd form commanders would be gathering on the East bank of the playing fields at lunch break. Here was our chance to break the stalemate by not only capturing the area, but also humiliating their leaders with our new inky artillery. Double maths seemed to last forever that morning as we strained at the leash to launch our attack. No sooner had the lunch break bell rung than we were out of the classroom, stuffing our pre-Jamie Oliver sugar loaded snacks and fish paste sandwiches down our throats as we went, ready to do battle. Our advance parties were already in position, ready to sweep the opposition around the biology labs aside whilst our raiding party moved through to deliver the humiliating blow. At exactly 1pm we went over the top in more ways than one.

The few second years that had gathered by the labs were swept aside and our flank attack seized the high ground only to discover that the bank was deserted, no-one in sight. We stood confused for several moments then Mike yelled “I hear them, they’re in the bushes!”

With a bloodthirsty scream twenty or so 1st years piled over the top of the bank firing inky pellets. It took at least ten seconds, in which, thanks to Mikes brilliant design of multiple firing mini-crossbows several hundred pellets soaked in blue Quink had been fired, for us to realise that it was not our 2nd form foe that stood before us but Miss Ashton, the biology teacher who had been out gathering bugs for the forthcoming 3rd year double biology period that afternoon. What’s more her white coat looked like it had developed a strange case of blue measles. I can’t remember what I thought at that moment. I think it was something on the lines of “Oh bother!”

Suffice it to say that we found ourselves hauled up before the headmaster who, to put it mildly was a little on the unhappy side that one of his staff had been assaulted in such a way. We were lucky to escape with several thousand lines each especially after almost all of us had been forced to desperately hide our sniggers with a variety of coughs, snorts and sneezes when he demanded “So who was it that shot Miss Ashton in the bush then?”

Death Game 1980

“Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!” So sang Adam and the Ants in the early 80s and it was a refrain that went through the heads of the dozen or so of us who had chosen ice skating as our sport of choice when we were allowed to choose whatever sports we wanted to do from the age of 14 at school. Little did our fellow pupils who had called us a “Bunch of wets!” know as they continued to be hounded around wet and muddy pitches that we had discovered the most monumental skive ever.

As a child I had done a bit of skating and won a few awards. The school skating lessons merely went over old ground with the possibility of earning a few certificates that I had skipped having taken the highest level when I was five years old and missed the rest as I could do more than skate forwards and backwards. The instructors put me through my paces and realising that I could actually skate to almost professional standards more or less told me to stop wasting their time and bugger off and do what I wanted whilst they got on with teaching the rest of the class how to stand up and not get a wet arse. In my case doing what I wanted meant honing my talents on the video games and pinball tables and drinking vast amounts of Cola in the rink café as the master in charge of our school was an exceedingly deaf chap called Mr Jennings who was rapidly approaching retirement and who invariably fell asleep on one of the rink side seats.

Most weeks were the same. Turn up, put on skates, skate a few circuits, try for a high score whilst waiting for my mates to finish their fifteen minute lesson, play pinball and drink caffeinated beverages then all scarper long before Mr Jennings woke up. All in all it was a total and utter skive. However, one small object was to make things decidedly different.

It was Kev’ who decided to liven things up one week by dropping one of those high powered bouncy rubber balls onto the ice. Within minutes a game of ice football had begun and that is where things began to go a bit awry. We shared the rink with a number of other local schools, some of which were our rivals and some of which were the rivals of other schools. Despite its so called ‘Poof’ status skating was always an interestingly edgy affair and violence simmered just below the surface. The game of ice football gradually sucked in more pupils from other schools and began to get a bit more ‘competitive’. It began to resemble less of a school skating session and more an extra brutal real life version of the Action comic strip 'Death Game 1999' of a few years earlier. In fact it is very possible that the writers of the Amiga game ‘Speedball 2’ may have been at that very rink, witnesses to the carnage that was about to break out. There were 500 teenagers on the ice rink; most of them hyped up on cola and sweets from the vending machines and someone had dropped a ball in the midst of them. Blood was going to be spilt. All it needed was for someone to yell “Ice Cream! Ice Cream!”

The first casualties were a party from a local Catholic girls school. Whilst their mates tried to cop off with the lads from the local Catholic boys school a few of the ‘wallflowers’ had elected to stay on the ice and skate round holding hands and talking about ponies or something only to be violently cut down by Kev’ who was trying to get the ball from one of the pupils from our rival school by barging him into the side barriers. They went down like ninepins and this was followed seconds later by a St Trinians like scream as the rest of the girls leapt the barrier and went after Kev’. The ball rebounded off the barriers and smacked another lad in the forehead with a resounding ‘CLUNK’. He too went down like a sack of spuds dropped from a great height and at least four other kids went arse over tit over the top of him. The ball meanwhile rolled into the throng and with a few kicks gathered momentum as most of the skaters oblivious to the bodies littering the ice continued to circle menacingly. By now Kev’ was skating for his life pursued by several vengeful girls. Perhaps unluckily the ball chose its moment to return to him and hit his ice skate with some force. The impact caused him to wobble and slip, the resulting tumble propelled him into half a dozen young ladies from one of the more exclusive girls schools in the area…who hated the Catholic girls with a vengeance and thought they had pushed Kev’ into them. Within seconds a full on catfight had broken out and it did not take long for about fifty other kids all bearing grudges or just up for a scrap to pile into the fray. Soon it was like ‘Fight Club’ on ice.

Meanwhile, myself and two classmates had grabbed Kev’ from the midst of the brawl and dragged him back to the changing rooms as the rink security and skating instructors joined the battle. As Mr Jennings woke up, disturbed from his nap by the sound of combatants screaming, yelling and trying to batter each other we were standing behind him beaming angelically and pointing out that “We left the ice because some of the other schools were misbehaving and getting rather rough sir!”

A few weeks later I was called up on stage during assembly to be presented with a handful of skating certificates by the headmaster. Apparently I had done the school proud by winning so many and in a school that valued sporting achievement that was a high honour indeed. I didn’t have the nerve to tell the headmaster that they had really been earned for drinking cola, getting a high score at ‘Galaxians’ and being part of a near riot that had resulted in most of the local schools being banned from the ice rink for an indefinite period. Luckily we were not one of them and our skiving continued unabated.

Football Crazy

Unlike my uncle Ernest who had played professional football in the 1930s and several other members of my family who could be found kicking a ball around the local park pitches as part of the Sunday League my own football skills left a lot to be desired. To tell the truth, an uncoordinated Gibbon on tranquillisers could have probably played the beautiful game better than I could. I loved football but put a ball anywhere near me and I immediately developed two left feet and a terminal loss of direction. Naturally this led to me being relegated to the side that included the asthmatics, the academics and the blind kid with the gimpy leg when it came to school games lessons and in a school that valued sporting prowess as much as and possibly more than academic achievement this was a bad thing indeed. Even though I was not too bad at cricket and could hurl javelins with the best of them my total inability to send a football in the right direction marked me as a useless loser in the eyes of certain masters.

One such master happened to be our games master who was an ex-paratrooper by the name of Jackson and who it was rumoured had been kicked out of the regiment for brutality. He loathed any sign of weakness and being useless at football was a sign of weakness in his book so he took it on himself to toughen us up by any means possible. This usually took the form of ten laps of the school field and an hour and a half of trying to kick a heavy leather ball that had been manufactured circa 1863 around the flooded bottom pitch that was rumoured to harbour a breeding colony of crocodiles and a couple of hippos in its swampy environs. By the end of the session most of us would be tottering around on leaden limbs and doing passable impersonations of a Glastonbury reveller on a particularly muddy day. Broken legs were not uncommon and the local ambulance service kept one of its vans permanently parked outside the gates that led to the fields. The lesson would normally be overseen by Jackson and the slightly effeminate maths teacher Mr Davies, to whom Jackson had been heard referring to in an unguarded moment in the PE masters staff cupboard as “That Welsh poof!”. That Mr Jackson himself had been relegated to teaching the uncoordinated and the sporting inept amongst us said a lot about what the head of PE thought of him as he was never let anywhere near the star pupils who could actually kick a ball. We hated the man with a vengeance but revenge was to be at hand albeit unintentionally.

The games lesson had begun normally enough with its lung bursting run around the periphery of the field that had left several of our group throwing up behind the pavilion and Neil whose bottle bottom glasses had steamed up getting severely lost and vanishing at a tangent behind the biology labs. Despite the losses Mr Jackson then produced the ‘Cannonball’ as we called it and those of us who were left were divided into two teams. For about an hour the game progressed without incident. Occasionally one of us even managed to coordinate our limbs for long enough to get a shot somewhere within fifty feet of a goal, which was lucky as both the goalies were asthmatic and any further exertion would have probably killed them. Then it happened. The ball suddenly landed at my feet and I heard Jackson’s bellow of “Run with it laddie!” from nearby. Mortal terror kicked in and I froze. I knew that if I tried to run with the ball I would inevitably end up on my arse in the mud, such was my lack of coordination in the vicinity of spherical objects on football pitches. I could hardly pick the ball up as we were not playing rugby that term. Thus I did the only thing possible and gave the sodden leather ball as mighty a kick as I could possibly manage.

True to form, the ball, instead of sailing gracefully up the field to where team mates stood waiting in hopeful expectation, or possibly waiting to see which of them the ball was headed for so that they could run away from it, shot off my boot at an angle and at high speed like a navigationally challenged Cruise missile. With a loud and sickening thump it thudded into Mr Jackson or more precisely an area slightly south of his waistline. The sound brought play to a halt not only on our pitch but the top pitch as well as even the head of PE winced. Only I was close enough to hear the strangled “Meep!” as Mr Jackson folded to his knees and curled into a foetal position in the soggiest, muddiest part of the pitch. His whistle slipped from his lips and tears rolled down his ashen cheeks as he lay there for several moments before rising unsteadily to his feet and as he staggered back to the changing rooms clutching his injured groin, Mr Davies was heard to add insult to injury with the polite enquiry of “So, do you need some liniment rubbing into that?”

Luckily the football term ended that week but we were treated to the sight of Mr Jackson wearing an uncharacteristically baggy pair of trousers and never once sitting down for several days afterwards and all those present at the time agreed that the ball could not have been better targeted than if George Best himself had kicked it.

Booze Club

Our Chemistry master, Mr Roberts, was an extremely trusting soul, perhaps a little too trusting of our sixth form chemistry group given that in the eighteen months he had been teaching us we had managed to almost gas the school, leave a large smoking crater in a demonstration bench after a thermite reaction went a bit wrong and nearly kill the headmaster as well. Perhaps these incidents had slipped his mind on the day he asked us to bring some alcohol in to the next weeks lesson for an experiment in distillation.

I’m sure he only meant for us to bring a small amount of alcohol in to school but when the fateful day arrived it came with the sound of clinking bottles from various rucksacks and shoulder bags. Taking his request a bit too literally we had all raided our parents wine cellars, sideboards and cupboards under the stairs and had with us a selection of booze that could have kept George Best, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and most of the tramps that gathered in the local park unconscious for about a week. Pete, our resident punk rocker had even lugged a gallon jug of 'Old Rats Arse' or some equally potent scrumpy in, presumably provided by one of his older mates whom he frequently got drunk with on the local green. Perhaps wisely, lest the boys toilet become more like a smoke filled pub than it usually was, other teachers insisted we left our experimental materials in the science lab so it was thus that the fume cupboard came to resemble a well stocked hostelry instead as the various bottles liberated from parents boozes stashes were stacked within. In theory only a small amount would be needed for the experiment, the teachers were already eyeing up the rest.

Our chemistry lesson was the last two periods of the day, in the afternoon and it started innocuously enough…as most disasters do. It started with us distilling the Sherry Simon had stolen from his mum to produce neat alcohol. From there it went downhill. Bored with setting it, whatever and whoever we could pour it over on fire we wondered what else we could do with the positive cornucopia of alcoholic delights arrayed on the bench before us.

As fate would have it, about halfway through the lesson Mr Roberts was called away to deal with a problem and being the trusting soul he was left us on our own. It was then that Mark decided to see what his grandmothers’ Sanatogen tonic wine tasted like and before long bottles were being passed around like a wine and cheese evening where the host had forgotten the Gouda. I had ‘borrowed’ two bottles of my fathers homemade Orange wine, this, most of the participants in that Bacchanalian excess swear to this day was our undoing. Calling it wine was a bit of an understatement. If his Elderberry 1978 was a cheeky little number, his Orange wine was like being slapped in the face with a large and very alcoholic cricket bat. In fact I firmly believe that my father was in talks with NASA as they wanted it to fuel their space shuttles. In terms of alcohol content only certain hard to find vodka and the methylated spirits the corner hardware shop sold ranked above it. Generous amounts were sloshed into some of the cleaner beakers that may or may not have been used in experiments involving poisons and knocked back leaving participants gasping at what was described as ‘a bit of pokey old tackle’ by another mate in later years. In fact, if prohibition had been in force my father could have expected a visit from Elliot Ness and the boys with a selection of axes and a warrant that would send him to Alcatraz for life.

Either the problem that Mr Roberts was dealing with was a serious one or he had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be teaching and had wandered off somewhere as by now he had been gone for almost an hour and the effects of our rapid alcohol consumption had kicked in as unlike current teenagers who spend their time hanging around in bus shelters with a bottle of Bucky and of course Pete, the most any of us had consumed was a small white wine, some of Auntie Mabels Port or a lemonade shandy made with the weakest beer our parents could find on Christmas day. Mark began to look green round the gills, Karen and Rachel were slumped against the cupboards at the back of the labs, Chris had wandered off down the corridor in a daze humming the Wombles theme tune and apparently “Looking for some ice!” and Andy was face down amidst a sea of beakers. As for me, I was attempting to convince Martin that mixing all the booze that was left into one super cocktail was probably a bad thing to do. Unfortunately I was having little success, mainly down to my own advanced state of inebriation. Grans Advocaat had never had this sort of effect on me but then again I had never sunk an entire bottle of it washed down with a gin chaser and a bucket of meths.

We might have managed to get away with it if nobody had spotted us weaving our way out of the school gates at home time and providing none of the teachers turned up. It wasn’t to be and for us it could only get worse as the headmaster, alerted to what was happening by Chris stumbling into his study demanding “Ishe cubes”, arrived just as Andy woke up and went “BLLLEEERCH!” into one of the sinks. The head took one look at the semi-conscious bodies slumped around the lab, Pete hugging the remains of his gallon of cider and Martins super-cocktail that was bubbling away lethally on the front bench and asked what was probably the stupidest question of his life…

”What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Looking back, Martins slurred answer of “Biology experiment sir, Effects of alcohol on human metabolishm. Been a bit too succeshful!” as he slowly toppled from his stool may have been the wrong one but it was absolutely inspired at the time.

Le Dejeuner

Like many grand criminal master plans before it my foray into forgery and deception was doomed to failure.

The school I attended, a grammar that was only a short step away from being a public school judging by the number of sound thrashings and buggerings meted out behind the bike sheds had an interesting method of dispensing exercise books. When a book was running out of pages either through being filled with material of educational worth or games of hangman and speed knobs the subject teacher would sign the back page and off you would run to the school bursar, show him the signature and be issued with a new, pristine book to cover with rampant male body parts and maybe a bit of learning as well. Thus it was that having gained the signature of Mr Wilton our French master I learned with a few weeks practice to turn out a reasonable facsimile of said scribble. Just being able to do this was, on its own a pretty pointless exercise unless I fancied landing the teacher in it by scribbling ‘Mr Jones is gay’ signed Mr Wilton on the back of the staff toilet doors. However, it did have one very useful purpose…

Like many schools we had staggered lunches so that pupils on games that afternoon got in first then the other years in turn. Presumably this was to ensure that those on games had time to digest their lunch so that the games lesson did not descend into a hundred or so boys throwing up in the bushes after our sadistic gym master sent the participants on the customary five warm up laps of the playing fields. The ground staff frowned on mass puking as it made the Rhododendrons wilt. The only other people who could get onto first lunch were teachers and those who were receiving extra tuition over the lunch break. Thus if you were not one of those you faced the likelihood of soggy chips, burnt pizza and congealed gravy…or it might have been custard, it all looked and tasted the same. Anyhow, having discovered a talent for forging the French masters signature I used this to sign the back of dinner tickets, for a small fee of course, which enabled fellow pupils to get into first lunch by claiming they were having extra tuition. The profits were not too bad, averaging between £5 and £10 a week which was a good sum back then and certainly kept me in Panini stickers and Mars bars. The only problem was that like most of these things it got a bit out of hand as more pupils discovered my talent.

I suppose I should have noticed but I was too busy separating my fellow pupils from their pocket money for the privilege of avoiding the leftovers that nobody else wanted. The jingle of filthy lucre brought to me by my skilled forging had blinded me to the fact that this particular week I had spent most of the morning breaks and the periods moving between classes signing dinner tickets. At one point a queue had even built up outside the boys toilets where in competition to Adam and his porn empire I had set up shop in one of the stalls and was banging out strips of tickets at the rate of two a minute. In fact it did not dawn on me right up until the moment Mr Wilton stormed across the playground, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me up to the headmasters office.

My criminal master plan had come undone the moment almost the entire third and fourth years had turned up in the dining hall demanding to be fed because they had extra French tuition, not that the school had a classroom that could hold some two hundred pupils all wanting to chant “Jean-Paul est dans le jardin de Marie-Anne”. The school cooks faced with having to try to shift an industrial amount of chips and pizza over the counter had immediately closed the hatches and refused to budge and as a result trouble was brewing. The head cook, a truly scary woman whose resemblance to Giant Haystacks was uncanny had gone in search of Mr Wilton, the apparent cause of the chaos clutching a steak tenderiser and on finding him had threatened to do something unspeakable to his nut clusters. Thus alerted that it was something to do with him he set about finding the culprit and someone, pissed off at being denied their pizza and chips had ‘dobbed me in’. Now I found myself up in front of the headmaster with an apoplectic French teacher virtually demanding that I be summarily executed in front of the whole school for daring to forge his signature. Luckily for me the head had obviously just received the bill for the last firing squad and decided that 2000 lines and confiscation of profits was a more just punishment. The only problem was that confiscation of profits meant an increased likelihood of a swift buggering or worse behind the bike sheds when I could not reimburse the irate lynch mob that was forming in the playground.

It was lucky then that I had also learned how to forge the Geography masters signature as well and was able to fob most of my fellow pupils off with that in a strictly controlled manner of course. So apart from the 2000 lines which I had bribed Nicko to do with a promise of a months worth of News of the World stolen from next doors dustbin that he could cut the glamour adverts out of it all ended quite well. I avoided severe pain and a sore arse and I even managed to recoup my profits from forging the Geography masters signature and increasing my used tennis ball business, the latter of which, oddly ended in pain and disaster as well but that’s another story.

Funnily enough, shortly after that I was suddenly demoted from Mr Wiltons top French set to what would now be known as the ‘remedial’ set. Not that I minded at all as it was taught by the far more pleasant and definitely more pneumatic Miss Lessing.

I never did find out who grassed on me though.

Stalag

As the gates swung slowly shut behind them they dropped their packs on the hard dusty ground and surveyed their new surroundings. There were the barrack huts, the toilet block, the simple hall and last of all the electric fence that enclosed it all. So this was where the troublemakers finally got sent. They stood in numbed disbelief as the commandant strode onto the parade ground.

“Zere vill be no escape! Any attempts to do so und you vill be shot…und ze village shop is out of bounds unless you are accompanied by a teacher!”

Class 4S had arrived at school camp.

It was late September 1976, the long hot summer was a distant memory and we had been packed off to school camp. None of us were sure why. It could have been to foster a sense of camaraderie in our last year at primary school. It could have been to toughen us up for a future career in the Foreign Legion or it could have simply been because our parents wanted to get rid of us for a couple of weeks so they could head for the local Berni Inn to stuff their faces with Avocado and Prawn salad and steak all washed down with a bottle of Blue Nun in peace. Whatever it was, it meant we found ourselves sharing semi-derelict huts with 20 of our mates and a variety of wildlife all set in a place whose resemblance to one of the prison camps most of us had only seen in the ‘Wooden Horse’ was reinforced by the graffiti on the toilet walls…’Hauptman Willi Schmitt 1943’.

For the next two weeks every day would be the same. Wake up sharing the bed with an assortment of bugs and the odd Badger who had crawled into your sleeping bag overnight as it was warmer and drier than their usual hedge. Be driven out of the hut by our shouty gym master and forced to dive into the outdoor pool that was colder than a seals arse during an arctic winter, although to be fair to him he usually dived in soon after, such behaviour not arousing much suspicion in those more innocent days. This was followed by breakfast served by a group of dinner ladies whose sense of humour had been surgically removed at birth and then we would go on an ‘educational’ trip that usually consisted of a ten mile hike up a windswept hill. In the afternoon we would return to be allowed a few hours freedom which would invariably involve electrocuting the class swot on the electric fence that surrounded the camp unless they had fallen down a cliff or wandered off in a fog bank on the hike. Most of us would go foraging in the surrounding woods for nuts and Damsons to supplement our diet before being served with dinner by an even more humour-impaired bunch of staff.

Within a day of arrival classmates could be seen wandering around the scrubby football pitch with earth trickling from their trouser legs, there were rumours of a tunnel going out from under the ‘concert hall’ stage and most of the spoons had vanished from the canteen for digging purposes. At least two of our number went ‘over the wire’ but were recaptured after running into a couple of guar...teachers staggering back from the local pub. Suffice it to say school camp was not that enjoyable, at least not until the penultimate day.

We had been hounded out of our hut, leaving our warm sleeping bags and whatever creatures that had joined us behind and were headed for the pool. The front ranks however, had halted on the edge and were staring at the frigid water whilst jumping up and down to work some warmth back into their limbs. As we reached them we saw why but from behind us we heard a yell of

“Come on you lot, don’t be such a bunch of nancies! Get in the water!” as our shouty gym teacher pounded down the path.

“But sir!” began Dave…

“Don’t but me lad! I’ll show you how it’s done!” came the reply as Mr Shouty dived into the pool, surfacing almost exactly in the centre of what we had been looking at.

During the night the cows in the field had managed to break the fence and were now milling around the football pitch. One of them was probably the one who had decided that the pool was the ideal place to drop a rather large load of cow dung, cow dung that had formed a dungy slick that our gym teacher had just surfaced in the middle of. For a teacher who had just called us a bunch of ‘nancies’ he could certainly scream like a girl as he launched himself, flailing from the pool, a dollop of cow poo running down his face and ran back down the path towards the toilet block where he locked himself in a shower stall for several hours. The memory of him emerging screaming from the pool plastered in cow manure stayed with us for the rest of the year and did far more to bond us together than any educational trip up a hill ever did. Years later I heard that the nickname we had bestowed upon him stayed with him throughout his school career and for the next twenty years pupils would know him as ‘Mr Sh*thead’.